Sunday evening witnessed the 65th annual Emmy Awards, American television’s equivalent of the Oscars. For those who take an interest in this kind of arcana, Breaking Bad won Best Series, Claire Danes carried away the Best Actress gong for Homeland, the comedies 30 Rock and Modern Family did terribly well, as did Michael Douglas’s Liberace star turn in HBO’s Behind the Candelabra.

Meanwhile, speculation was rife as to how viciously those Lannisters present might react to the news that Game of Thrones had won nothing (this is an official Game of Thrones joke, and, should you fail to understand it, know that you are lamentably outmoded).

Anyway, all of this is, obviously, completely irrelevant. For the real purpose of such occasions is to make those starriest individuals in our firmament strut their stuff, then award them a thumbs up or down for their style choices in the manner of so many jumped up Roman emperors. After all, these are the individuals paid to starve, exercise, sparkle and generally behave like dancing bears ready to be appraised by us, the lumpen masses.

In which case, what the hell was going on? To be sure, they’re not the Golden Globes or the Oscars, but the Emmys typically constitute a delectable confection of frocktastic eye candy to see us through the drear start of autumn. Instead, Sunday’s parade was akin to our own Baftas: tacky, cheap-looking, uncertain, with random bits of body making bids for freedom (see the breasts of Claire Danes/Julianne Hough/Cat Deeley/Jane Krakowski), plus legions of bulging, too tightly Spanxed stomachs and fit-to-burst fishtailed backsides.

The effect was reminiscent of a “posh”, suburban, black‑tie wedding, short only of the regulation BHS fascinators. There were too many flounces, too much ill-advised sheen and sparkle, tan lines juxtaposed with jaded faces, tattoos and hooker heels. Why, this is what we look like when we put on the glitz. From the small screen’s finest, we expect rather more. The collective reaction was less: “Shoot the stylist”, more: “Was there some sort of stylist strike?”

You are Americans, you can do this, not least when your television output is now rather more distinguished than your celluloid one. Not that the Brits showed the way. The lovely Michelle Dockery even deprived us of what fashion has come to know as “a Downton moment” in the form of an extremely ''blah’’, droopy-breasted, red and aubergine Prada affair.

In a collective example of how not to think pink, January Jones, Zooey Deschanel, Kerry Washington, Julie Bowen, Anna Gunn, Julianne Hough, Rose Byrne, Carrie Preston, Ariel Winter, someone called Jewel, Padma Lakshmi, Ireland Baldwin and the victorious Claire Danes wafted about in Andrex shades like so many Mr Kipling French Fancies. Wimpy whites brought up the rear.

Juxtaposed with this wishy-washiness came a phalanx of dodgy goths: Lena Headey, Amanda Peet and Aubrey Plaza (a person, apparently) exhibiting a look that could be entitled “when boudoir goes bad”. There was a series of positively pustular purples, some boring snoring blues (see Tina Fey, who won Best Writing for a Comedy Series for 30 Rock, in Narciso Rodriguez), and the odd bright. Kelly Osbourne – a woman actually paid to opine about other people’s fashion choices – looked like someone’s tattooed gran in a Jenny Packham number. Model Heidi Klum was astoundingly horribly dressed in grotty, burgundy Versace, but, then, being astoundingly horribly dressed would appear to be her thing.

Exceptions were thin on the ground. Britain’s Helen McCrory looked Hepburn chic in an elegant white sheath, also scoring best accessory in the form of husband Damian Lewis. Modern Family’s Sarah Hyland gleamed in emerald and black lace. Her colleague Sofia Vergara was curvetastic in structured, scarlet Vera Wang – breasts a tad too cantilevered, but at least supported. The young – Girls’s Zosia Mamet and the little one from Mad Men (Kiernan Shipka) – had fun dressing their age. Some canny PR had planted sumptuous emeralds about the place. And even Laura Dern’s Naeem Khan salmon-pink lace succeeded on a red carpet with so little else to commend it. On the whole, however, the evening can be summed up by my early decision that Nicole Kidman was its best dressed, before realising that she had been at some other event entirely. Really, America, step up.

Matters to bear in mind next year. One: bras – terribly useful, even on the anorexic bust. What hope brandishing Pilates arms when one’s bosom is Missing in Action? Two: designers, lend better stuff. Television is the new film and all that. Three: do the thing at night, by way of drawing a natural veil over the proceedings.